I haven’t been writing all that much lately. A lot of times I’ll start writing something and just not have the energy to finish it, even if I know exactly what I want to say. So I’ve been trying to find ways to break out of that.

Then the other day, while looking for an old yearbook that I’ve still yet to find, I stumbled across a physical copy of a story I wrote back in high school. The papers are date-stamped for January 2003, but I’m pretty sure I actually finished writing this at least a year earlier, and that’s just when this copy was printed.

The story is called “I Walk In.” It’s the first story I ever wrote for my own purposes, and is definitely rough. I’m pretty sure I plagiarized a Saturday Night Live sketch somewhere along the line.

It’s also very episodic. So I’m going to be typing up, and posting, an episode a day for… crap, how many parts where there? I think five, but I’m not sure. I haven’t gone back to read it through yet. If you read this update-to-update, you’re pretty much going to be discovering this story with me as I rediscover it.

So a little background:

When I was a kid, I used to have these stories that I’d build on when I didn’t have anything else to think of. Usually it was when I was going to sleep at night. Most of the times they were based off of some other property (Beetlejuice, Dexter’s Lab, and Sailor Moon are the ones I can think of off the top of my head), but sometimes they were more original.

I thought of these stories specifically in those times when a mind is most apt to wander. A lot of times I’d lose my train of thought and go somewhere else for a while. Somehow, I got into the habit of returning to my story by focusing myself with a three-word phrase: “I walk in.”

It was symbolic. I was the narrator, I wasn’t a character. But that phrase let me walk into the story in my mind, enter the setting, and then continue back from where I’d left off.

When I started writing the story that I’ll start posting tomorrow, that’s the feeling I was trying to convey. The feeling of a narrator entering his own story, watching as the events around him unfold into the events that haven’t happened yet.

I don’t think I did a very good job of translating that idea from my mind to the paper. But I was 15 years old, and it was my first story. I want to say I still did a good job of *something,* but truth be told, it’s been so long since I read it that I barely remember the flow of events.

So tune in tomorrow for part one. And then the next day for part two. And then the day after that for part three. And maybe reading and typing up this story, that was based off of a tool I used to get myself focused on coming up with new stories, will get me focused on coming up with new stories.

(Bonus points to whoever can pick out the SNL sketch that I stole from.)